Congress has handed Trump a historic presidential victory

President Donald Trump should give special thanks to two U.S. Senators this Thanksgiving weekend. One is still serving in the Senate, the other recently retired. One is a Republican. The other a Democrat. And what should President Trump be thanking them for? Quite simply they have handed him one of the biggest victories any president could claim in the past 45 years.

Yes, this has happened even as one of the most widely covered stories of the past year has been President Trump’s difficulties in working with Congress. The growing rift between him and Republican Senators John McCain, Jeff Flake, and Bob Corker alone has made headlines for months. For a U.S. president to have this many public feuds with senators from his own party this early in his presidency is really unprecedented and makes for hot news copy.

But that story ignores a bigger and longer-lasting development in the federal judiciary. That brings us first to naming the Republican gift giver: Senator Chuck Grassley from Iowa. The longtime member of Congress has big time clout as the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And Grassley has just used that clout to eliminate one of the final hurdles in the already furious pace of Trump administration judicial appointments to the federal bench.